Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Last cup of coffee!! At last - a man for Misshelver!

Every time I go into the Hastings bookstore here in Butte, Montana, I get annoyed to see antievolution books in the science section, especially since these books are not scientific in their antievolutionism, but motivated by the intelligent design movement or other religious factors. So, I usually remove the books from the science section and reshelve them in the religion section. Usually I find the books eventually returned to the science section, and wonder if the bookstore employee returning them ever thinks, “Why do these particular books keep ending up in the religion section?”

So, I keep moving them. Today I went to Hastings and had my camera with me. The copy of Signature in the Cell I moved a few months ago was in neither the science nor religion section, and was probably purchased. Today I moved The Edge of Evolution and The Darwin Myth away from the shelve directly under where copies of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth were, and placed them next to – I just had to – the Adventure Bible and the Princess Bible in the religion section. [links inserted by post author]

He should meet Misshelver, another self-absorbed Darwin nit who thinks little of other citizens’ rights.

By the way, spend your Christmas money on these books, given that they are an anxiety for trolls. If you could order from Hastings, all the better. Anyway, boasts like this tell you what to expect if Darwinists get to be even more of a power in the land. Take heed if your head of state announces an affection for Darwinism.

Coffee!! But the fake past was so much more FUN!!

Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China. But Science has learned that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums. One paleontologist estimates that more than 80% of marine reptile specimens now on display in Chinese museums have been "altered or artificially combined to varying degrees." One consequence of the fakery is an erosion of trust in museums, which are supposed to enlighten—not con—the public. Scholars, too, pay a price: They waste time sifting authentic specimens from counterfeit chaff. And a genuine blockbuster fossil can be destroyed by attempts to enhance its appeal. (Caution: Subscriber wall)
Besides which, the past can be faked to support whatever thesis an establishment likes ...

And an erosion of trust in museums may be long overdue. As Michael Ruse has noted*, E

volution after Darwin had set itself up to be something more than science. It was a popular science, the science of the marketplace and the museum, and it was a religion—whether this be purely secular or blended in with a form of liberal Christianity.

*For an informative account of the role of museums in the spread of evolution as
a religion, see Michael Ruse, The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 103–05. For his own ambivalent view, see pp. 113–14.